Peter Lucas: Haughty Hillary just can't help herself

What Hillary Clinton meant to say was that half of Donald Trump's supporters were really "adorable," not "deplorable."

But because of her confused medical condition -- or a faulty teleprompter -- it came out as "deplorable" instead.

She's lucky. She could have said "despicable," which is probably more in line with her thinking.

This was when the Democrat nominee for president, suffering from undisclosed pneumonia, made her now famous -- or infamous -- remarks at an elitist fundraiser in New York, that, "You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the 'basket of deplorables."

Obviously it was a miscue. Nobody talks like that.

Some campaign speech writer must have fed her the line and she screwed it up.

Once Clinton realized she had said "deplorable" and not "adorable," she could not go back. It was too late. So she was forced to plunge forward and add fuel to the fire. Backing off would have disappointed her fired-up, progressive LGBT audience.

These are the people who are opposed to discrimination and name calling, but only when it concerns them. Against everybody else it's all right.

So then, acting like a stand-up comic waiting for a laugh, she said, "Right" and plunged deeper into controversy by describing Trump supporters as, "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name it."

And she wasn't through. She said that some Trump supporters were "irredeemable" -- beyond redemption.

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"But thankfully they are not America."

The reason why many think Clinton confused the two words is because no politician seeking votes would, in their right mind, be so dumb as to go around insulting voters and calling them nasty names.

By doing so she and Bill Clinton run the risk of looking and sounding like the haughty Eva and Juan Peron of Argentina, the controversial power couple who ruled and ran their country into the ground.

A politician is supposed to ask people for their vote, not insult them. After all, the United States is a democracy where the people criticize their leaders, not the other way around, although with Barack Obama in charge, you would never know it.

It is one thing for Clinton and Trump to exchange insults; it is quite another for Clinton to then go on and insult the American voters for backing her opponent.

Instead of asking for votes, Clinton showed nothing but contempt for the millions of people who took the trouble to go to the polls and vote for Trump in the contested Republican presidential primaries, or who support him now.

By her standards, and by her remarks, these voters are not even good Americans. But then one might ask, given Clinton's problems with the truth, whether she is the right person to cast judgment.

Clinton tried to walk back her remarks, but she fell far short of apologizing. She attacked Trump, but added, "As I said, many of Trump's supporters are hard-working Americans who just don't feel the economy or the political system are working for them."

It was too little too late. By her foolish remarks, Clinton created a problem she does not need, coming as it does on top of all of her other problems, including questions about her health.

It played into Trump's campaign thrust that Clinton is at the center of the aloof and out-of-touch Washington political elite that holds the rest of America in contempt.

It was a campaign windfall. No sooner did Clinton complete her remarks, than Trump had a television attack ad ready to go.

The ad shows Trump and running mate Mike Spence handing out supplies to the victims of the recent Louisiana flood. A female voice over then says, "You know what's deplorable? Hillary Clinton viciously demonizing hard-working people like you."

And while Clinton rested at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., after being diagnosed with pneumonia, Trump went after her with gusto on the campaign trail, accusing her of "smearing" everyday working Americans who support him.

"For the first time in a long while, her true feelings came out, showing bigotry and hatred for millions of Americans," Trump said. "How can she be president of our country when she has such contempt and disdain for so many great Americans?"

Clinton should have listened to the late and great Groucho Marx who once said: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

Clinton, in ridiculing American voters who support Trump, went looking for trouble.

She found it. And it was deplorable.

Peter Lucas' political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.

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